We have seen an issue over the past few months where a machine’s slave will spawn on a machine and start rendering jobs.
this is a problem for us as we use a staging script to set environment options before running our slaves.
we have no schedules set for slaves to run but they appear and complete or error all our jobs in a short space of time and we end up with overall downtime coming in to see all jobs complete in 4 seconds?
I’ve been told this has been seen at other studios with deadline too.
is there any way to either
check the environment as a pre task script and disable the slave if eg. SITE=london doesn’t exist
add our environment to where the slave is launching from (not sure if it’s local or a network request i tried this by setting the enviroment and running the launcher service which now works with deadline monitor remote commands where it didn’t before)
set deadline to re queue and blacklist jobs that take less than 10 seconds
You might already have considered these, but here are few thoughts that came to mind.
You could maybe set the staging script on OnSlaveStartedCallback event to at least have the correct environment even if they are started out of schedule?
You could also shut the slave down on that event by setting SlaveEnabled as false. I haven’t used this so I’m not sure if this would affect the normal scheduling, my logic says it shouldn’t.
Another thing worth to check. Do you have Idle Detection active in Slave Scheduling for those slaves that seem to spawn slaves out of schedule? That could explain the behaviour.
Good thoughts from @panze there. I’ll expand a bit on it below.
A few other angles first:
Stop the Slave from starting at all:
The drastic end of the spectrum would be to delete the Slave executable. I usually recommend that for school installs.
Less drastic is that if the Slave is being started by the launcher and this is the problem, just disable that from the deadline.ini file. Details on that are here: docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ance-files
Disabling the Slave with that startup event script:
We actually have a pretty cookie-cutter script for this already. You’d just need to find a way to identify the site and set enabled/disabled: github.com/ThinkboxSoftware/Dea … veAutoconf
